| Title: | An improved ant colony optimization approach for optimization of process planning |
| Address: | "School of Energy, Power and Mechanical Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Baoding 071003, China" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 1537-744X (Electronic) 2356-6140 (Print) 1537-744X (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "Computer-aided process planning (CAPP) is an important interface between computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) in computer-integrated manufacturing environments (CIMs). In this paper, process planning problem is described based on a weighted graph, and an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach is improved to deal with it effectively. The weighted graph consists of nodes, directed arcs, and undirected arcs, which denote operations, precedence constraints among operation, and the possible visited path among operations, respectively. Ant colony goes through the necessary nodes on the graph to achieve the optimal solution with the objective of minimizing total production costs (TPCs). A pheromone updating strategy proposed in this paper is incorporated in the standard ACO, which includes Global Update Rule and Local Update Rule. A simple method by controlling the repeated number of the same process plans is designed to avoid the local convergence. A case has been carried out to study the influence of various parameters of ACO on the system performance. Extensive comparative experiments have been carried out to validate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach" |
| Keywords: | Algorithms *Computer Simulation; |
| Notes: | "MedlineWang, JinFeng Fan, XiaoLiang Ding, Haimin eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Retracted Publication 2014/08/07 ScientificWorldJournal. 2014; 2014:294513. doi: 10.1155/2014/294513. Epub 2014 Jul 6" |
